At Mark Brians looks at the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. In many cultures and religions we can find ideas and stories about seeds, plants and trees which bring to people goodness but also badness. From the ancient Norse Yggdrasil to the sacred Bodhi tree in Buddhism,… Lees verder 2 Trees of Eden
Nobody can ignore how the world evolves. In this world where division seems trumps real lovers of God and believers in the son of God should make an effort to connect with each-other and to show the world their unity even when there may be differences in the groups bringing richness in diversity.
We are limiting the meaning of the text of the first two chapters of Genesis when we would only consider earth to be our globe. From the whole Biblical contexts we may assume that we must see the difference between eretz (earth or land) and haaretz (earth or ground) and aphar ha’aretz (dust of the earth or the sand or grains of earth) having also the globe and other planets around in the universe with their suns and stars.
When Jehovah created the universe, he created so many stars and planets that we could never count them all.
Problem with man is that they always think they know exactly how something is. But man’s knowledge is much more limited than God’s knowledge so often scientific results first taken as the answer seem some years later not true. As such we had one time the newspaper, the Houston, Texas Chronicle, reported that
“after a recent study, scientists now think that there are 300 sextillion stars in the universe.”
NGC 4414, a typical spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices, is about 55,000 light-years in diameter and approximately 60 million light-years away from Earth
That is a 3 followed by 23 zeros! But we should know it could be many more and we should see that somehow they are all organized. Yes, groups of stars are organized into galaxies. Each galaxy contains many planets and billions or even trillions of stars. Most galaxies are then organized into groups called clusters, and these clusters are organized into larger groups called superclusters.
The first chapter of Moshe’s book does not want to bring a scientific report on how everything is placed and structured but only wants to give a short review in a way which is easy to tell to others so that they can easily remember. For that reason the story-telling is the easiest form for oral tradition, for which it was provided. As such we should not take the story to be taken literally but figuratively. Also not considering the 6 days as literally six 24 hours but more as periods of development or if you wish ‘evolution’ .
A Caucasoid female skull (National Museum of Health and Medicine).
Today we still evolve and we should see how our own children and grandchildren are already so much different than us (see their body build). Those who want to see the first man as our contemporary man from Europe or the United states of America (the Caucasian type) mostly have a superiority feeling of their own race and are ashamed to have come from living souls (Leneʹfesj chai·jahʹh) who walked on their four limbs. (If you look at the body perhaps it was even not being made to walk on two limbs.)
Those who want to adhere to creationist views show they are missing many points of later books which form together the library of Book of books we call the Bible.
One pro Gap position suggests Gen 1:1 is a summary statement of the whole chapter. While we read heavens and earth as meaning the universe and the planet, possibly the verse should be understood as meaning the sky and the land since the terms heaven and earth are used later in chapter 1. We can test this suggestion by reviewing the chapter and context.
When we look at the Hebrew there is nothing particularly to affirm or deny the suggestion. The word ‘heaven’ has a wide range of uses from the universe through to the sky and air. Similarly, the word for ‘earth’ is extremely broad. So we must go to the context of Gen1 and see how the expressions are used.
Heaven
Used in v1
V6 the firmament is defined as heaven (with waters above and below it)
V14 the sun, moon & stars are set/placed in the firmament…
Worldly books in no way can give such a clear picture to man what caused everything to come into being and how there may be a solution to the wrong steps taken by the first human beings. For this, man needs to understand clearly what caused this troublesome world. The Bereshith tells the story of the origin of life and death.
Jeshuaisten / Jeshuaists 